Please tell me that someone else has done this so I don’t feel like too big of an idiot…
I started milling my grain and noticed a strange noise coming from my mill. Everything went through, but nothing was crushed. Tried again, same thing. I haven’t checked the gap in years, so maybe it loosened up. Reset my gap to my normal setting. Nope, still no crush. So I crank the gap as tight as it will go. Still no crush.
That’s when I realized that I had used my drill recently. Sure enough, I left it reverse. So I reset my gap to my normal setting. Now the grain won’t go through at all when I start up the mill. After breaking down the whole mill yet again I see that the second roller won’t spin at all. Apparently all those spins in reverse caked the other roller with grain dust and bound it up. I cleared the dust out and it started spinning like new. Finally, I got back to my normal crush the next time through.
Thankfully, the rest of the brewday went off without a hitch, but took about 45 unnecessary minutes longer. Had to share.
Not here. My drill is keyless, so I need it in forward to tighten the chuck. Keyless sucks for milling BTW, and any other high demand task, so I’m getting a proper keyed drill for milling at some point.
I have not done the exact same thing, but I do some version of that maybe once a week. A couple weeks ago I filled my chainsaw with fuel and bar and chain oil, put it in a wheelbarrow with a bunch of other stuff I needed and went over to my bee yard to cut down some brush and set up the electric fence for the season. I grabbed my work gloves and found them to be soaking wet for some reason and put them back without thinking of it. I went to start my chainsaw and after 15 minutes gave up, muttering and swearing about what a PIA two stroke engines are. I figured out later that the fuel cap wasn’t threaded correctly and all the fuel leaked out. Hence the soaken wet gloves. I got a blister between my fingers from pulling the cord so many times without gloves.
I swear to God I’m a pretty smart guy!
I lost over an hour a week ago on new 3 roller mill that I had just assumed I had setup correctly. Don’t feel too bad. I do this kind of stuff all the time.
I now need to figure out my efficiency drop. It has to be the crush but that beer was the easiest sparge I’ve had in years.
Keyless chucks suck - period.
You should be able to tighten the chuck enough to prevent slippage if you use a couple pairs of water pump pliers [channellocks].
